This is a narrative of what happened to me in these last few days. In the spirit of dailykos, a political blog, I have included some observations of Fox News and the real difference between the right wing and the left. I have included some arguably bad political humor but any extended stay in a hospital can make you as itchy and twitchy as a bear cub who has accidently discovered an active bee hive.
But mostly this is about Death waving at me as he passed by.
I am a normally healthy, forty-eight year old male. I don't exercise enough, I'm a little too soft and could lose a few pounds but my cholesterol is below the danger line and I haven't had any symptoms. What happened to me was a complete surprise.
It all started with a routine stress-test. In a stress-test, they hook up to a machine and then exercise you. You start with a nothing walk on a treadmill and progress up to a fair run up a fair incline. The whole idea is to raise your heart rate up to around 150, stop the test and then take pictures of the heart before it recovers. For a forty-eight year old male with no symptoms and no personal history of heart problems, this should be no big thing. In fact, this first stress-test would be the baseline for all the other stress-tests in future years.
There were two techs and a cardiologist in the room with me. Everything was going fine. I was about twenty-five seconds away from being finished; I know this because a tech said so. I was tired and my knees hurt because treadmills are not soft running surfaces. I wasn’t feeling anything in my chest, I wasn’t having trouble breathing and I actually felt good about being able to finish the test without asking to stop.
Then the other guys got all excited. The doctor shouted, "Stop the test. Stop the test." They hustled me on to the table and I assumed everything was going as it should. Then the doctor told the techs to "get the cart" and "call code." He snapped off a few more orders and then looked down at me. He said, "You’ve gone into an arrhythmia. Don’t worry; we’re going to take care of you." I was clear-headed and asked him to explain arrhythmia. My heart had shot up to a dangerous rate (later I found out I’d gone up to 220 beats per minute; yes, that’s beats per minute, not my blood pressure). The cart was taking its time to get ready and I became aware that, yes, they were getting ready to give me a hit of electricity. I was actually calm enough to know that if they did, I was going to pee all over myself because that was another reason why I was happy the test was over. Nature was calling.
The doctor looked at me and said, "Don’t hate me for this. I want to help you. I need to give you a jolt to snap you out of this." I said fine, do what you have to do (I assumed the paddles were coming) and then he punched me in the chest! It worked, or at least it worked enough to get him to calm down. Eventually I got some Toprol, which is a heavy-hitter medicine to slow me down. Things calmed down enough that we finished the stress-test, which I passed, and the doctor and I were discussing my coming into the hospital soon for a CAT-Scan. Then one of his partners, a heart rhythm specialist, called. The two doctors conferred and decided on the conservative approach, which meant I was going into the Emergency Room as soon as an ambulance could get me there.
By the way, for you technical types, what happened to me was a Ventricular Tachycardia (VT, for short). There was an abnormal circuit in my heart that sent electrical signals in a loop to my heart's ventricles, thus causing my heart to beat faster and faster. What scared everybody was that the VT would progress to a Ventricular Fibrillation (VF, for short) where the heart is beating so fast and is so out of sync that it can't pump blood effectively. If emergency treatment isn't given to return the heart to normal rhythm, well, that's it.
I take a bizarre form of pride that two fire engines and an EMT ambulance responded for me. Understand this: I had never before ridden in an ambulance. I had never before been admitted into a hospital or been an Emergency Room patient. This whole experience was so full of first-times that it’s hard for me to list them.
Anyone who has been in an Emergency Room knows that things can be a bit slow. Well, I was hooked up, signed up, CAT-Scanned and in a room in the Cardiac Telemetry ward in less than four hours...on a Friday night. I guess I was at the top of the triage list.
The next day, I had a more specialized type of EKG and an MRI. The doctors were looking first for plumbing problems like a blocked artery. After ruling out that kind of thing, then they would check out my electrical system. I was scheduled for an angiogram where, if they found a blockage at this one spot the CAT-Scan highlighted, they’d put in a stent. A stent is like a tiny hair curler that is placed in position and then expanded by a balloon. That would open up and keep open an artery. If the angiogram was negative, however, then I would have an EPS, Electrophysiological Study. This would test my heart’s electrical system. Depending on the results of the test, I could have had a part of my electrical system cauterized or I would have a defibrillator installed. Both of these tests required me to be in a semi-sleep state while they ran optic wires from my groin up to my heart through an artery (angiogram) and then a vein (the EPS).
But I had to wait a day because it was Sunday. Here's where the politics comes in: Since my admission to the hospital, I'd been sharing a room with a nearly deaf older man. It was bad enough that every time anybody came in to see him about anything they had to shout. This included discussions of his bowel movements, successful or not. But his being unable to hear meant that he needed his television to be turned way up loud. His choice in television was limited to two things: cooking shows and Fox News. Whatever you may know about Fox News from dailykos diaries, Crooks and Liars snippets and its general reputation as the house propaganda organ for the Republican Party, it is nothing like having to listen to it for an extended period of time. I am now a witness: according to Fox News, there is only the weather and terrorism. I heard someone say, literally, that, "The Jihadists are going to kill us!" Every story, every commentary, every preview of upcoming shows (except for a roundtable review of the new "Simpsons" movie which was glowingly received by, of course, Fox commentators because it is a Fox program) was directed at how viewers should be afraid, trust the Bush leadership and disparage the Democrats who, of course, never talk about terrorism.
Before I get back to my medical stuff, I want to address this obsessive demand that we all be afraid. In simplest terms, the right wing/Repubican/Fox News combination offers absolutely no hope in our future. None. Therefore it is my feeling that every Democrat must incorporate hope, just raw we-can-fix-this, we-can-do-better, we-can-work-our-way-out hope into every speech from now till next November. Since I had a lot of time on my hands, I came up with three particular areas to focus on: energy, education and infrastructure. All three of these areas need reorganizing, retooling and lots of people can be employed, which is never a bad thing. I thought of some names for programs in the spirit of the National Recovery Act (NRA) during the depression. Let's start with a grand overview: the American Strength and Security act. With the exception of the particularly wealthy and certain Republican officeholders, we could all use a little A.S.S., right? I think every government organization should go through a Solar Energy Examination, particularly in the southwest and west. President Bush babbled about hydrogen power but has done nothing so I think we should expect a Hydrogen Usage Monthly Projection from now on. Globalization has messed up many economies so we need a fresh view bringing together all parts of our society for Businesses Organized for Future Industrial Networking Globally. A good BOFFING might be just what we need to reinvigorate the population. Certainly we could work with other sea coast nations to preserve the oceans while using their advantages. We can call it Shared Hydroponic Agricultural Generation.
But overall, without a doubt, an emphasis on hope and programs that encourage, generate and reinforce hope should have the effect of providing all Americans with a good Spirit Created Over Resource Initiatives Newly Granted.
God be praised, I was moved into a private room during Sunday. I was losing it.
On Monday, I passed the angiogram. The suspicious area from the CAT-Scan did show a small amount of heart disease but in the walls. There was no blockage. I’m now on Lipitor to aggressively bring down by cholesterol, which is somewhat high but not in the danger zone.
The EPS showed a need for a defibrillator. Here’s how I know how special a case I was: one of the techs, who see these things all the time, called over a nurse saying, "Hey, you should see this" while she was looking at the record of my "episode." They were looking at page after page of what looks more like a trigonometric sin wave than the normal, periodic blips you see on heart monitors on TV.
The next day, I got my defibrillator. It’s a small box with a minicomputer and a battery. That was installed into my right chest because I’m left-handed. I can’t see how big the scar is because the dressing is still on; I’m told it’s just a couple of inches. There is an optic fiber from the defibrillator in my heart now. If the day ever comes when my heart takes off like a race horse, I’ll receive a shock. They tested it while I was on the operating table. It feels like a good punch in the chest. I now have my own, private, crash-cart to carry around with me for the rest of my life.
In a strange but real way, I am less likely to die now than I was five days ago.